Chapter energy and technology the enhancement of skin

5.5. Agricultural surplus and cities

As I have mentioned above, thanks to the domestication of animals and (later) inventions like the harness and the metal plow, more and more land came under cultivation. It seems to have started about 10,000 years ago, in the highlands of present-day Kurdestan, where it rained enough for crops year-round. But 6000 years ago (4000 BCE) a band of farmers moved south into the valley of the Tigris-Euphrates. They made it into the “fertile crescent” by digging a ditch – then many ditches – to irrigate the land during dry seasons. Similar migrations occurred in the Valleys of the Nile, the Indus, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers in China. The richer irrigated farmlands created a food surplus. By 3000 BCE the agricultural surplus in these valleys was enough to provide food and feed output equivalent to 14 kWh per person per day (although much of it was consumed by the animals).’

An accompanying development was urbanization: villages, towns and cities. The oldest (or, at least the most thoroughly studied) human settlement was Jericho. It was settled about 9000 BCE, as the last glaciers were melting. The first occupants were Natufian hunter-gatherers. There were 70 dwellings surrounded by a stone wall 3.6 meters high and 1.8 meters broad at the base. There was a tower inside the walls 8 meters high, with 22 stone steps. This was not needed to protect against wild predators. It was needed to protect the villagers from forays by other humans on “hunting” expeditions.

Over the next 7,500 years nearly twenty settlements came and went. By the time Joshua arrived with his Israelites, c. 1550 BCE, the stone walls were much higher and there was a brick wall on top. Their collapse of the walls is hard to explain unless there was a fortuitous Earthquake. Large clay pots containing grain have been found in the ruins.

Larger cities like Memphis in Egypt and Babylon in Sumeria probably also began as defensible forts which served as storehouses for the surplus grain, as well as protection for the population. The vulnerable farmers, who were unable to leave their land and herds, needed defense, so tribes needed protectors. The would-be protectors also fought each other, human nature being what it is. The winners gradually increased their domains and eventually became warlords and kings. The kings lived in the cities, and collected taxes (often in the form of grain) from their subjects. These taxes financed other activities, including the support of increasingly powerful priesthoods, and the manufacture of other goods such as pottery, textiles, and primitive metal objects (from horse-shoes to swords and plowshares).

On this agrarian base rested the first “high” civilizations of East Asia, India, the Middle East, and Egypt. In the agrarian societies economic and political power rested with the landowners, because they controlled the useful energy embodied in herds of animals and the products of photo-synthesis. In Latin, the original expression for cattle, “pecunia”, assumed the meaning of “money” and hence of portable wealth. Even today, in parts of Africa, such as the Masai of Kenya, wealth is measured in terms of cattle ownership. In due course, the cattle-owning tribal leaders became land-owning nobility and accumulated political power. Feudalism in some version became the dominating political system of most agrarian societies. It gained strength with the increasing energy needs of these societies, as they advanced technologically, commercially, and militarily.

5.6. Slavery and conquest

Human history from 3000 BCE to the Industrial Revolution is normally presented as a sequence of kings and conquerors, like the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Greco-Persian wars, the fabulous Alexander the Great, the rise of Rome, Hannibal, the defeat and conquest of Carthage and Gaul, the eventual downfall of the western Roman empire, Charlemagne, the rise of the Ottoman empire and the fall of Constantinople, the sieges of Vienna and the endless wars of religion. Much too much attention is awarded to Great Men (mainly prophets, kings, generals, and Popes) plus a few women (Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great).

By the same token, historians have focused far too little to the role of technology, resources and institutions. We suspect that the evolution of social institutions deserves far more credit from historians than it has yet received, but I am a physicist, by training and inclination, so I will stick – so to speak – with my knitting. The rest of this book deals with the major inventions and innovations in history, including ways to exploit the sources of useful energy (exergy) to perform useful work in human society. I cannot hope to compensate for the historical distortions. However, I can focus on a few key innovations while ignoring the self-important men on horseback.

Imagine how human history would have appeared to a very long-lived observer from some Tibetan “Shangri-La” where occasional travelers, like Marco Polo, would stop in occasionally to gossip. He (she?) would have noticed that, between two and three thousand years ago, slavery became the dominant mode of socio-economic organization. It probably started with the invention of irrigation, which occurred about that time {Postel, 1989 #4119}. Irrigation by canal required a lot of ditch digging, and there were no machines to do it. Nor, at that time, were there any animals like water buffaloes yet tamed and able to pull heavy weights. The work had to be done by human slaves.

Later, slaves did almost all of the work required to support the life-style of the (relatively) few “citizens” of Rome, from plowing the fields, in the mines, making the great roads, and propelling the ships. The ordinary Roman soldiers, who fought the battles, captured the prisoners and kept them in their chains – literally or figuratively – were not much better off than the slaves, even if they were legally “free” men, even volunteers.

What may not be obvious, at first sight, is that slavery in Rome was a step up, in terms of modern values, as compared to its predecessor. The invading Hebrews killed all the inhabitants of Jericho, except for one girl. The fate of Troy was the same. (If the defenders had won, of course, the attackers would have received the same treatment.) In prehistoric times (and as recently as Ghengiz Khan and Tamurlaine) it was normal for an invading army to kill all the inhabitants of any conquered city that had offered resistance. Later, the winners kept the women and girls, but killed the men and boys.

But as time passed, armies were increasingly hierarchical, with a professionalized officer class of armored cavalry, a middle class of bowmen, and a lower class of spear-carriers and cannon-fodder. When a military force surrendered the leaders sometimes had cash value and could be ransomed. The mercenary professional soldiers, under contract, just changed sides. Draftees died or disappeared into the woods after a battle. (Many lived on as vagabonds or outlaws).

But as regards the untrained infantry some smart general had a better idea. A captured barbarian soldier could be disarmed, restrained by iron chains, and put to work, in an irrigation ditch, a mine or galley or a construction project. In ancient Greece, as reported by Homer’s Iliad, one slave was worth four oxen. Slaves of that worth were well treated. But things changed when lots of prisoners of war were thrown on the slave market at the same time. This must have happened during the Alexandrian wars of conquest during the fourth century BCE and the Roman-Carthaginian wars. The market value of slaves crashed and their treatment deteriorated correspondingly. Slave insurrections like those of Spartacus (73-71 BCE) were the result.

The population of the world, and of the territory controlled by Rome in particular, was growing. To feed Rome, and its armies, new large estates or “latifundia” in North Africa, using slave labor, were introduced. For a time, they produced food at much lower cost than the free peasants of Greece or Italy could do. The population of Rome was kept happy – a relative term – by free grain and “pane et circenses“ (bread and circuses). The bread was made from imported grain from North Africa and the circuses were mostly contests between (slave) gladiators or dangerous animals. Ruined economically, the farmers of Rome become the permanent Roman army (whose business was to acquire more slaves) and the Roman proletariat. The Roman Empire was fed for several hundred years by the grain-lands of North Africa, Egypt and Gaul. But the eastern regions around the Black Sea became more important and Diocletian split the government into two regions, keeping the eastern one for himself, which he ruled from Croatia (Split). The Emperor Constantine, who followed, moved the eastern capital to Byzantium (renamed Constantinople) which dominated East-West trade for the next thousand years and more.

The western Roman empire finally perished because it had become a military society that had no room to expand except to the north, where there were no more cities to loot and where the land was heavily forested, easy for barbarians to defend, and difficult to farm. The Christian Church, having been legalized by Constantine, spread rapidly throughout both halves of the empire after 325 CE. This process was accelerated after the key doctrines – the “Nicene creed” – were agreed to by the Council of Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey). There was one key difference, having to do with the nature of the “Trinity” and the divinity of Christ. It is said, tongue in cheek, that the Eastern and Western branches of the Catholic Church were separated by the placement of a single letter, hence the phrase “an iota of difference”.

The (western) Roman Empire finally collapsed under the onslaught of barbarian Germanic tribes, such as the Huns and the Visigoths, probably due to inability to pay their own armies or protect the farmers who fed the cities. New feudal societies evolved in Europe, with parallel and competing secular and clerical (Church) hierarchies. The slow-motion collapse of Rome left a vacuum briefly filled by the Emperor Charlemagne. But his successors, the Holy Roman Empire (neither Holy nor Roman) was weakened for several hundred years by the unresolvable conflict between ecclesiastical and secular power centers, which meant control over resources. Ecclesiastical power peaked when Pope Alexander III forced the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I (“Barbarossa”) to acknowledge his authority over the Church and to kiss the Pope’s foot in Venice (1178). Barbarossa died during the third crusade (1190) leaving no obvious successor. Thereafter, the Papal power was supreme in Western Europe for a century.

Its signal “achievement” was the 4^th crusade, initiated by Pope Innocent II, in 1198, who wanted to end the split between the Eastern and Western branches of the Catholic Church, under his own control. The avowed purpose was to support and defend the Christian communities in the Holy Land. The Crusaders agreed to pay the Venetians 85,000 silver marks for the ships and personnel to transport the huge Crusader army to Cairo. The Holy See, having no money of its own, reneged on most of this debt. This left Venice in a severe financial difficulty.

To recover their investment the Venetians, under doge Dandolo, diverted the bulk of the Crusaders to Constantinople. They were welcomed as protectors at first, but proceeded to sack in 1204. The Crusaders destroyed the Hagia Sophia and the great library, among other desecrations. The value of gold and other precious goods stolen was about 900,000 marks, of which the Venetians recovered about 200,000 marks, making a profit. (The marble face and interior walls of St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice were all brought from Constantinople.) The rest of the loot was divided among the Christian Princes who led the Crusade and the Venetian, Florentine and Genoan merchants who financed it. Byzantium itself was subsequently split into three parts, but the Mongols, Tatars, Turks, Kurds, Turcomans and Persians gradually swallowed the hinterland. Byzantium survived in Greek enclaves like Trebizond and Caffa around the Black Sea for another 250 years, but finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE. (But Georgia and Armenia remained independent).

The peasant farmers of Europe, both east and west of the “pale” – roughly the boundary between the two branches of Catholicism (the eastern border of Poland) – were not bought and sold. But they were taxed, drafted into military service (for which they had to provide their own weapons) and tied to the land. Most were no better off than slaves. Jews were expelled at times by England, Spain and Portugal and Russia “beyond the Pale”. They moved, when possible, to other places, such as the Low Countries, Austria, Poland, the Ukraine (especially Odessa) and Turkey. Residence in towns in Western Europe was very tightly restricted as membership in the guilds of artisans (not to mention musicians, like the Meistersingers of Nuremberg) was even more tightly controlled.

Slavery and the near slavery of feudalism were abolished in Western Europe in stages, beginning in the 14^th century and finishing early in the 19^th century. Western European feudalism started to break down during the “Black Plague “of the 14^th century, which created a labor shortage and enabled towns to become more independent of the landed aristocracy. Slavery in Europe was finally swept away by the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. But slavery was still a big business for European ship-owners supplying the plantation economies of America. Over ten million African slaves were transported to North and South America during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Slavery existed in the Arab countries of Africa until the middle of the 19^th century. It still survives in parts of India, where children are sometimes sold by their parents for debt.

Slavery in European-American civilization finally ended with the American Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. That was followed by several amendments to the US Constitution. In that first modern war the industrialized, “abolitionist” Northern States crushingly defeated the agrarian, semi-feudal, slave-based southern Confederacy, even though the latter had quite a bit of help from the English, whose Manchester-based textile industry depended on cotton imports. The American Civil War probably demonstrated, once and for all, that a slave society cannot compete economically with a free one.